Waiting for God

Saturday at dialysis I passed three hours watching Book TV on CSPAN 2. One segment was a rerun of the National Book Critics’ awards for the best books published during 2009. I don’t keep up with best sellers, but since I also don’t follow sports, and the movie on TCM was a two-star dud, I watched authors accept their prizes.

The big surprise was when the award for autobiography went to Diana Athill for her memoir, “Somewhere Towards the End.”

I not only read this book, I have a copy sitting on the table beside my recliner, where I set the book down after I finished reading it Friday afternoon. My friend Gertrude mailed it to me from New York, telling me to pass it on to someone else after I read it. I’ll do that next week.

I wonder what the other residents in this retirement community will make of it. A local author came here last month and sold copies of her new book on coping with old age. A “Christian author”, the old folks here found her book inspirational. Ms. Athill’s book, written at age 88 as she contemplated her own death, is a very different kind of book.

Ms. Athill, from an upper class British family, worked for many years for a London publisher. I am jealous that she has friends in the book business who were eager to publish and publicize her book, while I can’t even get my friends to read my blog.

She writes well. Her book contains many interesting passages on the physical limitations that come with age, on religious attitudes towards death (she is an atheist) and on her own approach to dying. The critics love her.

While fascinated by her ideas, I told Gertrude, “I don’t think I would like this woman as a person.”

Gertrude said, “I would hate her.”

Diana Athill is totally self-absorbed. Her attitude towards sex and men is callous. She shamelessly admitted many affairs which she enjoyed for sex without the messiness of being in love. She wrote, “Several of the painless affairs involved other people’s husbands, but I never felt guilty because the last thing I intended or hoped for was damage to anyone’s marriage. If a wife ever found out – and as far as I know that never happened – it would have been from her husband’s carelessness, not mine.”

Childless, her only regret seems to be that she did not have a daughter to care for her in her old age, the way she – admittedly reluctantly – cared for her mother.

I can not remember her writing with compassion about any friend facing the inevitable death.


I also am selfish. I do as I please, determined to enjoy every day I have left. But I hope I never miss an opportunity to show concern and, if possible, make life more pleasant for others. To me helping someone get through today is more important than worrying about which of us will die tomorrow.